General high school teachers? perceptions regarding their schools organizational trust

The aim of this research Is to determine the level of organizational trust of theteachers employed in general high schools towards their schools and to testwhether the organizational trust level in schools differentiate with respect to somevariables (gender, occupational experience, educational level and branch ) or not. Inthis study, the organizational trust level of teachers working in high schools is evaluatedaccording to some dimensions. These dimensions are "sensibility to employers'", "trustto manager ", "communication environment' and "openness to modernity".The population of this descriptive research based on survey method is composedof 1153 teachers employed in 19 public general high schools in the CentralDistrict of the city of Diyarbakır during 2010- 2011 academic year. 498teachers constitute the sample of this research. In this case, the sample representsthe research population in the percentage of 43,19.In research, "Organizational Trust Scale" is used for the purpose of gatheringdata. This scale is a type of Likert scale that is developed by Daboval, Comish, Swindleand Gaster (1994), translated to Turkish by Kamer (2001) and verified the validityand reliability, adapted for using in schools by Yılmaz (2005). The first part ofthe scale is composed of questions about demographic features of high schoolteachers participating in the research. The second part includes questions aimed atmeasuring the organizational trust perception of high school teachers. In accordancewith the purpose of the study, percentage , t-test, one-way Anova (variance) tests areemployed to analyze the data. For the statistical analyses SPSS 15.0 is used.Significance level is taken as 0.05These are the important results of the research:1. Significant difference is not found in "sensibility to employers'' , "trust tomanager", "communication environment" and "openness to modernity" sub-dimensionsof organizational trust with respect to occupational experience of teachers, educationallevel of teachers and branch of teachers. But in terms of gender variable, the teachers'trust in the school organization demonstrates significant difference in "openness tomodernity" sub-dimension. In this respect, for the organizational trust sub-dimension,"openness to modernity" male teachers ( x =3,33) have higher trust than the femaleteachers ( x = 3,05).v2. The high school teachers' trust for their school is "at mid-level" ( x =2,97) in sub-dimension of "sensibility to employees", "trust to manager" subdimensionis at "high level" ( x = 3.69), "communication environment' sub-dimensionis at "high level" ( x = 3,58) and "openness to modernity' sub-dimension is at"mid-level" ( x = 3.23).3. The results show that general high school teachers perceiveorganizational trust levels in their schools at a moderate level ( x = 3,33) .Key Words: Trust, organizational trust, trust to manager, openness to modernity,general high school